lit a candle of our Advent wreath each week at chapel...
celebrated St. Nicolas and St. Lucia Day...
made ornaments for the tree...
and enjoyed preparing for and celebrating Christ's birth together!
Merry Christmas from Crestwood Day School!
Books We're Reading At School
Celebrating the Church Year
12/30/2011
07/23/2011
Happy St. Nicolas Day!
Since we include the Christian calendar as an important part of our school year, today we read about St. Nicolas. St. Nicolas would secretly leave gold or presents for the poor and needy, sometimes in their shoes or stockings. I knew I wanted to leave a little something for the kids. So while I was reading the story, Dawn (the other teacher at our school) left these little treats in their baskets to find!
I've seen these Candy Cane Mice on Martha for a long time and thought this was the perfect opportunity to finally make them. They were simple to make and the kids loved them!
Next Monday is St. Lucia Day - we'll be making these for the kids to wear. I'll be sure to share some pictures of them!
Our Lenten Garden
I know I've said this before, but I love weaving in our Christian traditions and seasons into our school day. It sets a rhythm for our day and year.
For the season of Lent, we made our own "Lenten Garden." I know there are many different ways to do this, with different variations, but I thought I'd share what we did. It's super easy!
Let me first say that I recently bought Ann Druitt's All Year Round, a beautiful book that gives you tons of ideas to do with kids for all the holidays and seasons through the year (the product description on the amazon page describes the book perfectly).
So one of the ideas for Lent is to build a "Lenten Garden." In the book, the garden is built at the beginning of Holy Week, but we just went ahead and got our garden ready. I loosely followed the instructions in the book, which you can find here.
On our nature walk today, we gathered the necessary supplies: lots of moss, stones, rocks, and a small branch for our Lenten tree (my friend Lauren uses two sticks that make a cross instead of a tree). Back at school, we assembled the moss over some rocks in a pie plate. You could use any shallow dish you have!
We formed a "grotto" from clay that you bake in the oven, and placed it next to the tree. Then a patch of stones from the tree to the grotto was next. I squeezed in a small terracotta pot dish to make a "pond," with a piece of bark as the "bridge" over the pond.
We added some other rocks around and then I spritzed it really well with water (and will continue to do so in the coming weeks). During Holy Week, we'll add the stone that gets rolled in front of the tomb/grotto.
And on Easter morning, the stone will be rolled away and the garden will be alive with flowers!
*If you'd like to see another example, check out this site. Also, we've been reading Helen Haidle's Journey to the Cross - I'm really enjoying it so far and would recommend it as a great Lenten reading to do with kids.
Celebrating Epiphany
I love weaving in our Christian traditions into our ordinary school day. Today we celebrated Epiphany with our very own special Epiphany cake. Basically, epiphany is a time to celebrate and reflect on the three Wise men following the star to the new king, Jesus.
So to celebrate, I made a pound cake in a tube pan before they got to school and hid three jelly beans (for the three Wise men) inside the cake after it came out of the oven. Then the girls and I smeared on some icing and adorned it with different kinds of "jewels," all edible of course. We even put chocolate covered gold coins in the hole in the center of the cake. So fun! The final touch was a gold crown, celebrating Christ the King!
For more information and ideas to do with your family and friends, check out this article my friend Rebekah shared with me. Also, this book has been extremely helpful to me in learning about these traditions - I highly recommend it!
